First Athlon XP reports

Some Germans already confused

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A few tests have started popping up on the Web in anticipation of tomorrow's Athlon XP launch from AMD.

Ace's Hardware has a posting summarising some benchmarking results published in c't magazine. It shows a 1.53GHz Athlon XP scoring 597 on a SPECint_base2000 test, which put it just one point ahead of a 1.8GHz Pentium 4. It outran the older 1.4GHz Athlon by just over 100 points, while the 2GHz Pentium 4 led the pack at 626 points. Details of how accurately these tests were performed are, sadly, not available, but it does provide an early idea of what to expect.

The site also has a scanned image of an advert running in Germany that shows just how confusing AMD's new processor naming system is. The advert is for a Fujitsu-Siemens running an "AMD Athlon XP 1.7 GHz Prozessor". If it is actually referring to the new 1700+ Athlon XP processor, then this is actually a 1.47GHz processor.

Any benchmarks done using SYSmark 2001 will not be completely accurate. This is due to the Windows Media Encoder 7.0 component not recognising the chip’s SSE capability unless a patch has been applied. Currently, it is only able to pick up 3DNow! optimisations. AMDZone has a full explanation of the issue.